How do I set or change issue attributes via email?

Sifter recognizes some basic instructions when interacting through email. All instructions begin with a #, must be placed on the first line of the email, and are separated by spaces.

For example, if you wanted to use multiple instructions you could use the following on the first line of your email.

#resolve #a:gdimon

Status

When replying to email notifications, you can also update the issue statues. You can't select a status when creating an issue because they're open by default. It doesn't make much sense to create an issue and immediately close it.

For example if you want to resolve an issue, you would use the following command on the first line of your email.

#resolve

We know it can be hard to remember the exact variation on the commands, so Sifter recognizes several variations for each status.

For reopening an issue, we recognize the following commands. You may wonder why variations on open are included here. Since all issues default to open, you'll only be able to update statuses when you reply to comment notifications. As a result, you'll never really be able to open an issue. You'll really be reopening it. So we recognize variations on open for convenience.

#reopen, #reopens, #reopened, #open, #opens, #opened

For resolving an issue, we recognize the following commands.

#resolve, #resolves, #resolved

For closing an issue, we recognize the following commands.

#close, #closes, #closed

Assignee

When creating issues and replying to notifications, you can also change the assignee or unassign issues. In order to reassign issues, you must know the user's username. We've included a list of the available usernames at the bottom of this page.

For example, if you wanted to assign an issue to yourself, you'd include the following on the first line of your email.

#a:gdimon

If you wanted to unassign an issue, you would include the following command on the first line of your email.

#unassign

Reassigning Issues When creating issues and replying to notifications, you can also change the assignee or unassign issues. In order to reassign issues, you must know the user's username. We've included a list of the available usernames at the bottom of this page.

Milestones & Categories

You can also change milestones and categories similar to assignees, but there are some subtle challenges here to work around spaces in category and milestone names. When submitting a value for a category or milestone, spaces need to be replaced with underscores, and if your category name already has an underscore in it, it will not work because Sifter can't distinguish between underscores for spaces and actual underscores.

If Sifter doesn't find a category or milestone match, either because of a typo or because the category doesn't exist, it will silently discard the requested category or milestone value. We suggest being careful with this feature as typos can be problematic, but with great power comes great responsibility.

Here are some examples for categories...

#c:database, #c:new_feature

And for milestones...

#m:alpha, #m:bug_fixes, #m:2.0.1

Priority

When creating issues and replying to notifications, you can also change the priority using the priority attribute of the email through your email client. If you set the email to the highest priority, Sifter will set the priority to 'Critical'. If you don't set a priority, Sifter will leave the priority on 'Normal.'

While most email clients support five priorities, corresponding exactly to priorities within Sifter, some only support three priorities. In this case, the three priorities represent 'Critical', 'Normal', and 'Trivial'.